Chaghcharan

The mountains around Chaghcharan gave Afghanistan one of its great dynasties. In the 12th century the Ghurids, local rulers from these valleys, built an empire that reached from eastern Iran into northern India, and their summer capital, Firuzkoh, is widely thought to have stood in the Hari valley near the Minaret of Jam, some distance west of the modern town. The minaret, raised in the 1190s and covered in carved inscriptions, is what survives of that centre; the Mongols destroyed the Ghurid capital in the 1220s, and its exact location has been argued over ever since. The modern town took the name Firuzkoh officially in 2014, though Chaghcharan remains in common use.

For most of the centuries that followed, Ghor was mountain country outside the main routes of empire, held by local chiefs and by the semi-nomadic Aimaq peoples. Afghan rulers in Kabul brought it under central administration in the 19th century, and it became a province in its own right in the 20th, with Chaghcharan as the seat of the governor: a bazaar, an administration and an airstrip in a place with almost no industry.

The town was fought over during the Soviet-Afghan war and the civil wars that followed. After 2001 a provincial reconstruction team was based here and aid organisations built roads, schools and a hospital, giving the settlement its first real growth; work also began on conserving the Minaret of Jam, which is threatened by erosion from the rivers at its foot. The province passed to the Taliban with the rest of the country in 2021 and most international aid ended.

Ghor is Persian-speaking country with a strongly rural culture. Dari is the language of the bazaar and the household, and much of the rural population belongs to the Aimaq peoples — Persian-speaking, traditionally semi-nomadic groups who move flocks between valley and high pasture and have long been known for weaving. Hazara communities live in the east of the province towards the central highlands, and Tajiks and Pashtuns are also present, so the town's market brings several traditions together.

Life is governed by the extended family, the village and its elders, who settle disputes and organise shared labour. Hospitality is emphatic: a visitor is fed before being questioned, and refusing tea is difficult. Weddings are the great social occasions, with music on the long-necked lute and the frame drum, days of feasting and the exchange of obligations between families. Dress is conservative throughout, and men and women's spaces in a household are separate.

Because Ghor has never had many towns, its culture is carried in portable things: felt and carpet weaving, embroidery, songs, and a deep stock of Persian poetry and proverbs used in everyday speech. Nowruz, the Persian New Year, has traditionally marked the end of a winter of isolation and the return of the herds to the high pastures, although it is no longer an official holiday. Literacy rates are among the lowest in the country, and much knowledge is still passed on by speech rather than writing.

Chaghcharan is small for a provincial capital — its municipality is credited with about 130,000 people, and it feels like a large village with an administration attached — but it is the only real town in a province of some three-quarters of a million. Almost everything happens on one street: shops, transport agents, a few guesthouses and the tea houses where deals are made. Around it, walled compounds of mud brick spread towards the river and the pastures.

The economy is livestock, rain-fed farming and trade. Sheep and goats are the main wealth of the province, with wool and dairy sold through the town; wheat and barley grow on the valley floors, and potatoes have become an important cash crop in parts of the highlands. Government salaries, the hospital and the schools support a significant share of households in the town itself, and remittances from relatives working in Iran matter throughout the province.

Winter dominates the calendar. Families lay in flour, fuel and dried food before the snow, roads close for weeks, and prices rise sharply; heavy snowfalls and spring floods regularly cut the province off and damage villages. Ghor is among Afghanistan's poorest provinces: electricity is limited and often from generators or small solar panels, drought has hit harvests repeatedly, and the end of most international aid after 2021 removed both jobs and services. Restrictions on girls' secondary education and on women's work apply here as elsewhere.

Highland cooking is plain and built on bread, dairy and meat. Naan baked in a tandoor comes with everything, and shorwa — lamb or mutton simmered long with potato and onion, the broth poured over torn bread and the meat eaten afterwards — is the standard meal. Kebabs of lamb are grilled over charcoal in the bazaar, and palaw, rice steamed with meat, carrot and raisins, marks a wedding or an honoured guest rather than an ordinary day.

Dairy is the store that gets households through winter. Milk from sheep and goats becomes yoghurt, butter and curd, and above all qurut, hard balls of salted dried yoghurt that keep for months and are soaked and beaten into a sharp white sauce for rice, dumplings and kichri qurut, a dish of rice and mung beans. Mantu and ashak, steamed dumplings filled with minced meat or leek, are festive food here as across the country.

Fruit is limited by the altitude but mulberries, apricots, apples and walnuts grow in sheltered valleys and are dried in quantity; dried mulberries ground with walnuts make a dense sweet paste eaten in winter. Potatoes have become a staple of the highland diet. Tea is drunk all day, mostly green and unsweetened, with sheer chai, a milk tea, for cold mornings, and it is offered to every visitor within minutes of arrival. Alcohol is prohibited.